An intentional seaside community called Ocean Park, founded in 1881 on Saco Bay, is looking at ways to protect its most vulnerable buildings from rising sea level and extreme storms.
The Ocean Park Association hired historic preservation specialists Barba + Wheelock Architects to develop a strategic plan for a dozen buildings, including one known as the Temple, built in 1881.
“We’ve gone into great detail,” Nancy Barba, a Barba + Wheelock principal, told Mainebiz.
Barba + Wheelock, founded in 2004, has decades of preservation expertise. It recently joined architecture, interior design, construction and millwork firm Woodhull to form a historic preservation studio. Barba joined Woodhull as a principal architect, leading preservation initiatives.
Chautauqua tradition
Ocean Park is a village within the York County town of Old Orchard Beach. It started as a family-style summer community in the Chautauqua tradition, hailing back to New York’s Chautauqua Institution, a not-for-profit shared community.
The Ocean Park Association offers spiritual opportunities, educational talks, recreational activities and cultural arts performances.
Today, the village is becoming more of a year-round community, said Fran Day, the association’s executive director.
Day brings 20 years of nonprofit and higher education leadership experience and served as transitional president of Future Generations University in West Virginia.
The association maintains the public spaces and owns Ocean Park’s programmatic and commercial real estate, including a post office, library, church, educational buildings, a recreation building, grocery, bookstore, commercial rentals and a forest that’s under conservation easement.
All together, the village comprises 750 to 800 residential structures within a square mile; members of the association own about 550 to 600 of them. The work of the association benefits everybody in the community.
Sea rise
Sea level rise is threatening some buildings closest to the bay. A surge in January 2024 brought water over the first floor of the library and other low-lying buildings. The association received funding to rebuild the damaged portion of the library.
“The question now is whether to raise up some of these buildings,” said Barba.
Five or six buildings are at risk from sea level rise.
Other buildings, on higher ground, are at risk from worsening windstorms. That includes the Temple and some houses that are adjacent to a white pine glen. The pines are beautiful but don’t have a deep root structure, noted Barba. Accordingly, the association had some of the trees taken down.
Barba + Wheelock was hired about 15 years ago and put together a report at that time on 10 of the buildings. In the past year, the firm was brought back to start with a fresh look at 12 structures with a detailed study of condition, cost, strategic planning and project prioritization.
Temple and bell tower
The community, laid out along grid streets, is made up of bungalows and small Victorian buildings. Assembly activities center on Temple Square, the geographic center of Ocean Park and the name for the plot of land on which the Temple, Porter Memorial Hall, B.C. Jordan Memorial Hall and the Bell Tower stand.
The buildings date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Temple was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. The other buildings were added to form a historic district called the “Ocean Park Historic Buildings.”
Built in 1881, the Temple is Ocean Park’s oldest building. It is a wooden, octagonal building, 80 feet in diameter, that seats up to 750 people.
The Bell Tower was built in 1882 and consists of a square wooden structure with ornate decoration. Porter, dedicated in 1902, is a temple-form building with fluted Corinthian columns and a pediment that contains the words “Hall in the Grove.” Dedicated in 1915, Jordan is used for meetings, concerts and dramatic presentations. Features include a four-column colonnade and rectangular windows.
Next steps
The strategic plan looks not only at climate challenges but sustaining the community into the future, said Barba.
Next steps include raising funds to execute the plan, said Day. That could include growing the membership and donor base and looking for outside historic preservation funding, Day said. The association will appoint a committee to determine criteria and priority actions, she said.
“We have had a strategic planning session and we are looking at how we want to now flesh out this nascent strategic plan to help us move forward,” Day said.
